This weekend amongst night shifts and a quick visit to Expo EM North, I’ve been completing the final elements of Shelfie2. Like most man caves mine has too much ‘stuff’, particularly ‘stuff’ that gets in the way. I have two desks one primary desk for construction, and a secondary desk for painting. The second desk is an area that needed rationalising, and at Expo I invested in some paint racks and a paint stand from ebma to make the paint desk ‘work’ better. I use quite a bit of Vallejo and decided to try Ebma’s PR004 vertical paint storage rack for so I invested in four of them, and here’s a quick overview of the kit.

The kit is simply and effectively packaged with no plastic, the box can be reused my first thought was that’s about right for a 4mm coach or locomotive.

The components are laser cut and require very little preparation.

One or two sections needed holes cleared but these pieces just fell out with a little pressure placed on them.

There are online instructions on their website, but as it’s a man cave project, those obviously weren’t consulted! The kit is pretty much shake the box and it goes together, there’s two section to take note of if winging it like I did. The top shelf has oval cut outs in (see above). These allow access to screw the finished paint rack to the wall, and make sure the rear section has the screw mounting plates fixed at the top.

I fitted the horizontal shelves first followed by the vertical struts. Make sure you alternate the shelf types so the paint tubes will fit correctly. The fit is excellent and I used very small amounts of PVA adhesive to fix the components together.

The laser process leaves scorch marks and you can build the stand with the majority of the scorching hidden.

Each kit took about twenty minutes to assemble and it was pleasant to make a piece of ‘furniture’ from a flat pack kit that didn’t involve copious amounts of foul language. The fit of the paint tubes is close, tight enough to hold them securely, but not an interference fit.

The second item I bought was the weathering and painting stand RPS-4 for 4mm Scale stock.

Again the kit took a short amount of time to put together, it includes self adhesive foam backing for the rear of the support and base. It will comfortably accommodate the length of a 4mm class 40, large steam locomotive, or Mk3 coaching stock with no problems. I’ve tried it weathering an Accurascale hopper today, and I quite like it, though it’s not grabbing me as an intuitive piece of ‘tooling’. I suspect I’ll really see the benefits when doing stock such as HO freight cars, and cylindrical tank vehicles.

In summary both these products are well worth considering. Components are excellent quality, and importantly fit together accurately with no problems. The paint racks work as standalone racks or can be wall mounted easily. The weathering and painting stand I think has good potential, the reason why it’s not immediately lit any fires is likely because it needs adapting to, and a subtle change in my work processes, I’ll see if it becomes a ‘must use’ tool, or just an occasional user item.

I’ll let you know.